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Potato Bread
Take six good-sized potatoes, boil and mash very fine. Add three pints of boiling water. Stir flour in till it makes a stiff batter. When lukewarm, add yeast; set it in a moderately warm place. In the morning add the salt and knead in flour as stiff as you can. Set in a warm place to rise; knead again, adding as little flour as possible. Let it rise again, and then put it into your pans, making them half full. When the loaves have risen to the top of the pans, bake them to a nice rown.
A sponge-and-dough potato bread written for a cook who already knew what bread dough should feel like. Nearly every quantity beyond the potatoes is left to judgement, so the notes below fill in the gaps.
- The hinge: cool the sponge before the yeastThree pints of boiling water poured over hot mashed potato will kill yeast on contact. The instruction "when lukewarm, add yeast" is the one line that cannot be rushed; wait until the batter is no warmer than about 100F.
- Yeast quantityThe original assumes a homemade or compressed cake yeast of unknown strength. For a batch this size, two packets (about 4 1/2 tsp) of instant or active dry yeast is the modern equivalent, though the overnight rise means half that will also work.
- Salt"The salt" is never specified. Bread is normally salted at 1.8 to 2 percent of the flour weight, which for this batch works out around 2 to 3 tablespoons of fine salt. Salt does slow fermentation, which may be why it is added only in the morning here, but the recipe gives no reason.
- Scale and yieldSix good-sized potatoes plus three pints of water will absorb roughly 4 to 5 lb of flour and give three to four large loaves. Halve everything unless you are feeding a household.
- "Bake to a nice brown"No temperature is given at all. Bake at 400 to 425F for 35 to 45 minutes for standard loaf pans; the loaves should sound hollow underneath and read about 200F internally.
- PotatoesUse a floury variety such as russet, boiled and riced or mashed with no butter, milk or seasoning. Waxy potatoes stay gluey and will weigh the crumb down.
- "As little flour as possible"Potato dough is naturally slack and sticky. Resist the urge to flour it into submission at the second knead; the extra moisture is what keeps this bread soft and long-keeping.
- Timing the overnight sponge"Set it in a moderately warm place" until morning means roughly 8 to 10 hours at about 70F. A modern kitchen at 75F or above will over-ferment it by dawn and leave a sour, slack sponge.
Potato bread was a thrift bread before it was a specialty bread. Boiled potato supplied starch and sugars that fed the yeast, which mattered when the yeast in question was a homemade barm of uncertain vigour; the potato gave it something to work on and made a more reliable rise. It also stretched expensive wheat flour with something a household grew or bought cheaply, and the retained moisture kept the loaves fresh for days in an unheated pantry. Recipes of this kind were a common feature of American household manuals, and they carry into later compilations like this one, still written in the old overnight-sponge form.